Monday, August 16, 2010

Calling Molly Ringwald: a brat pack for our time

I will be curious to see if Scott Pilgrim vs. the Worldcan get beyond the curse of a disappointing opening weekend to build on word-of-mouth – its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a solid 80%, 8.0 on IMDB’s 1-to-10 rating scale – or whether the film will capsize under its very own strengths.

If the filmmakers want to know why the picture tanked on its first weekend, all they have to do is to check the demographics of their receipts – there could not have been more than 3 women in the (mostly empty) theater where I saw the film, and the IMDB ratings Saturday night were as follows:

Being the internet, all IMDB stats skew male – 60% of the ratings for Sex and the City were from guys – but these numbers border on 86%. This suggests a gender disturbance in the force, so to speak, which may seem odd to somebody who doesn’t know the comics on which this film was based, given that it’s about a sensitive guy who has to learn to trust his feelings, with two strong female characters (Mary Elizabeth Winstead & Ellen Wong) playing against Michael Cera’s oh-so-vulnerable title role.

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Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman taught at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania & was writer in residenceat the Gloucester Writers Center.